That Greek crisis people have been predicting for a few years is finally here

This is from Greek Prime Minsister Alexis Tsipras's speech calling for a referendum on the Troika bailout.

After five months of hard bargaining, our partners, unfortunately, issued at the Eurogroup the day before yesterday an ultimatum to Greek democracy and to the Greek people. An ultimatum that is contrary to the founding principles and values of Europe, the values of our common European project.

They asked the Greek government to accept a proposal that accumulates a new unsustainable burden on the Greek people and undermines the recovery of the Greek economy and society, a proposal that not only perpetuates the state of uncertainty but accentuates social inequalities even more.

Greek voters will make a choice between shitty economic times while they at least preserve their own democracy or shitty economic times with the added bonus of de-facto rule by international banksters.  What would you do?

Leaving a currency union is, however, a much harder and more frightening decision than never entering in the first place, and until now even the Continent’s most troubled economies have repeatedly stepped back from the brink. Again and again, governments have submitted to creditors’ demands for harsh austerity, while the European Central Bank has managed to contain market panic.

But the situation in Greece has now reached what looks like a point of no return. Banks are temporarily closed and the government has imposed capital controls — limits on the movement of funds out of the country. It seems highly likely that the government will soon have to start paying pensions and wages in scrip, in effect creating a parallel currency. And next week the country will hold a referendum on whether to accept the demands of the “troika” — the institutions representing creditor interests — for yet more austerity.

Greece should vote “no,” and the Greek government should be ready, if necessary, to leave the euro.

This pension will self destruct

Just like, say, a Snapchat message.

City Finance Director Norman Foster, who has been a voice for skepticism on the NOMERS board, questioned whether the pension fund, anyone else for that matter, could predict the future.

In the 1990s, a Mesirow fund of funds saw returns in the single digits when massively overvalued tech startups tanked. Whose to say the current fund wont tank in a similar way, Foster said.

Snapchat, as a privately held company, doesn't have to disclose much about its business, so not clear what, if any, revenue stream it has. It's a free service that doesn't even, as yet, sell much advertising. The company's gaudy valuation is based entirely on the assumption that the it will be able to monazite its user network, which is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.
"How much was Snapchat valued at," Foster asked.

"Nineteen billion," DeBolt replied.

"And how much revenue did it make last year," Foster continued.

DeBolt demurred. "That's confidential, but you can guess that it's a pretty small number."

If that's not a bubble, Foster said, then nothing is.

Pension funds should never ever ever be invested in high risk tech stocks like this.  Unless the goal is to end up with decades long lawsuits on their hands, like this one.  Or unless you don't actually care whether or not the fund can support pensions over the long term which is probably the case.

Banksters eat pensions

The problems with the New Orleans firefighters pensions are different from this. But not too different.

The Lenape tribe got a better deal on the sale of Manhattan island than New York City’s pension funds have been getting from Wall Street, according to a new analysis by the city comptroller’s office.

The analysis concluded that, over the past 10 years, the five pension funds have paid more than $2 billion in fees to money managers and have received virtually nothing in return, Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said in an interview on Wednesday.

“We asked a simple question: Are we getting value for the fees we’re paying to Wall Street?” Mr. Stringer said. “The answer, based on this 10-year analysis, is no.”

Until now, Mr. Stringer said, the pension funds have reported the performance of many of their investments before taking the fees paid to money managers into account. After factoring in those fees, his staff found that they had dragged the overall returns $2.5 billion below expectations over the last 10 years.

“When you do the math on what we pay Wall Street to actively manage our funds, it’s shocking to realize that fees have not only wiped out any benefit to the funds, but have in fact cost taxpayers billions of dollars in lost returns,” Mr. Stringer said.

Why the trustees of the funds — Mr. Stringer included — would not have performed those calculations in the past is not clear.

What the post-partisan grown-ups think

Actually... who cares what these people think. Just please stop calling them "centrists" as if that means they're some sort of disinterested wise observers of all our dirty arguing.